National Defence committee The civilians we'll be hiring will be in direct support to the Canadian Armed Forces. We'll certainly be putting them into areas like intelligence, cyber, and more into procurement. We'll continue to use a mix of our own people and private industry on maintenance and support.
P

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee We don't see a shrinking of the fleet maintenance facilities at all, but they will be doing the higher-value, more technologically complicated land support.

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee The plan right now will increase the delegation of authority from Public Services and Procurement to National Defence, and that will take care of about 80% of the defence procurement contracts that are $5 million or less, and we'll manage those.
That will leave Public Services w

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee Oh, sorry, you asked about the investment plan.
Yes, our intent is that for the first time we will publish our investment plan. Normally, that's something we take to Treasury Board, they approve it, and—

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee Nobody ever sees it.
So in the interests of transparency, there are two things in this policy. One, we are going to publish regular public report cards on major procurements. They will say what our intended schedule was and how we are doing against it, so you can hold all of us

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee Yes, the $8.5 billion was not a cut to the defence budget. We had to clean up the balance sheet before we brought in the policy and the new money. We were simply moving money to when projects like fixed-wing SAR will arrive. Because of accrual accounting we have to put the money

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee Sure. Thank you, Minister.
In doing the costing, we engaged external experts from Deloitte who worked with our costing model. We had 29 personnel inside, and we hired Deloitte—which had done costing for the U.K. and Australia's defence policy as well. The projects were re-costed

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

National Defence committee Sure. There is $62 billion in new money over and above planned increases, which include the 3% the minister referred to. Even starting this year, there's $600 million coming on top of what was already planned in the defence budget. In the first five years, there's $6 billion in n

National Defence committee Because the policy came after the budget and after the main estimates, the normal process is that we would come to committee in the supplementary estimates to request the additional funding.
One last point is that, as I said, there's $6 billion over the first five years. In Defe

June 20th, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

Public Accounts committee I totally agree with you.
We made a decision to close some offices. That's going to save us some money on bricks and mortar. As you've rightly pointed out, we're not about to reopen those offices. If we thought that was a wrong decision, we would be reopening those offices. What

Public Accounts committee I have a short response, just to clarify my remarks.
I don't have a problem with government saying that we need to balance a budget and that all government departments need to tighten their belts.
I wasn't in defence at the time we made the choices of what to cut. I am just com

May 3rd, 2017Committee meeting

John Forster

Public Accounts committee My challenge right now is to go.... I need to restore some of the capacity in the recruiting group to meet the recruiting levels we need to get in order to rebuild the force to hit the 68,000 on the regulars and the 28,500 on the reserves.